Ready to Talk to a System Engineer?

Please enter your information and we'll contact you to set up a call. Thank you!

Customer Success Story

Customer Success Story

Township High School District 113 Opts for Scalability, Selects ExaGrid over Data Domain

Customer Overview

Township High School District 113 serves 3,750 students in two schools, Highland Park and Deerfield High Schools, from the communities of Deerfield, Highland Park, Highwood, Bannockburn and Riverwoods, Illinois. Both schools are accredited by the State of Illinois and the North Central Association of Colleges and Secondary Schools.

Key Benefits:

  • Seamless integration with Veritas Backup Exec
  • Data now replicated between two sites for Disaster Recovery
  • Full backups took the entire weekend, now take 10 hours
  • System management went from 8 hours to 1 hour per week
  • Expert support is top notch
Download PDF

Backing Up Fast Growing Data a Constant Issue for IT Staff

Township High School District 113 had been grappling with how to back up and protect its rapidly growing data set for some time. The school district had been backing up information to a primary datacenter and then sending it to a dual LTO-4 autoloader tape drive located at a disaster recovery site, but backups often couldn’t be completed in time to meet backup windows.

“We couldn’t keep up with nightly backups, and we had begun staggering our weekly full backups to run on alternating weekends because we couldn’t complete everything by Monday morning,” said Ronald Kasbohm, director of technology at Township High School District 113. “In addition, our tapes and drives had started failing. We were extremely concerned about performance and our ability to recover from a disaster. Backups were taking up more and more of our time, and we finally decided to begin looking at other alternatives on the market.”

"Scalability was a factor we looked very closely at. When we compared the ExaGrid and Data Domain systems, we felt that the ExaGrid was more scalable because we can easily expand the system to add both capacity and performance without a forklift upgrade. "

Ronald Kasbohm, Director of Technology

ExaGrid Delivers Superior Scalability and Tight Integration with Leading Backup Applications

After considering products from both ExaGrid and Dell EMC Data Domain, Township High School District 113 purchased a dual- site ExaGrid disk-based backup system with data deduplication based on discussions with other school districts and vendors. Data is replicated between the two sites in case it is needed for disaster recovery.

“We spoke with several other school districts in our area who use ExaGrid, and they gave the system rave reviews. We also heard very positive comments from vendors we work with,” said Kasbohm. “Scalability was a factor we looked very closely at. When we compared the ExaGrid and Data Domain systems, we felt that the ExaGrid was more scalable because we can easily expand the system to add both capacity and performance without a forklift upgrade.”

ExaGrid’s appliance models can be mixed and matched into a single scale-out system allowing a full backup of up to 2.7PB with a combined ingest rate of 488TB/hr, in a single system. The appliances automatically join the scale-out system. Each appliance includes the appropriate amount of processor, memory, disk, and bandwidth for the data size. By adding compute with capacity, the backup window remains fixed in length as the data grows. Automatic load balancing across all repositories allows for full utilization of all appliances. Data is deduplicated into an offline repository, and additionally, data is globally deduplicated across all repositories.

Kasbohm said that another key reason the district chose the ExaGrid system was its tight integration with leading backup applications. “The ExaGrid system works with all the major backup applications, so we can choose the best solutions for our environment. We knew we wanted to continue using our existing application, Backup Exec with OST, and were easily able integrate the two products,” he said. “We recently decided that it would be more advantageous to back up our 77 virtual machines to Veeam. Because the ExaGrid supports it, it’ll be easy to do.”

Backup Times Reduced, Faster Restores

Since installing the ExaGrid system, the district’s full backups take only ten hours instead of running throughout the weekend as they did with tape. “Now that we’ve installed the ExaGrid system, I’m never concerned about our backup window. One of the major differences is that we’re able to run multiple backup jobs simultaneously now, which makes everything far more efficient. Our backups run so quickly and consistently now that we’re considering running full backups every night,” Kasbohm said.

ExaGrid’s post-process data deduplication technology also helps to speed backup times and reduce the amount of data stored. ExaGrid writes backups directly to a disk-cache Landing Zone, avoiding inline processing and ensuring the highest possible backup performance, which results in the shortest backup window. Adaptive Deduplication performs deduplication and replication in parallel with backups for a strong recovery point (RPO). As data is being deduplicated to the repository, it can also be replicated to a second ExaGrid site or the public cloud for disaster recovery (DR).

With tape, restores were a constant source of frustration, said Kasbohm. However, restoring data from the ExaGrid system is far less time consuming and complex, he said. “We used to have to get someone to pull tapes out of our vault, go over to our disaster recovery site, swap the tapes and then pull the data off the tape. The whole process used to take a half a day. Restores are so much faster with ExaGrid. I was recently able to restore large AutoCAD files for multiple students in less than 15 minutes. It’s really a game-changer,” said Kasbohm.

Easy Setup, Knowledgeable Customer Support

Installing the ExaGrid system was easy to do, said Kasbohm. “Setup was unbelievably smooth. We racked the systems and our ExaGrid support engineer called us up, finished the setup, and walked us through the system. The documentation is easy to follow and clear-cut, but it was also nice to know that we had a live support person with us to make sure everything went well,” he said. “Our ExaGrid support engineer is absolutely fantastic. He’s easy to reach and really knows his way around the ExaGrid system. He also knows Backup Exec inside and out, which has been an enormous help to us.”

The ExaGrid system was designed to be easy to set up and operate. ExaGrid’s industry-leading level 2 senior support engineers are assigned to individual customers, ensuring they always work with the same engineer. Customers never have to repeat themselves to various support staff, and issues get resolved quickly.

Reduced Management and Administration Makes Day-to-Day Operations a Breeze

Kasbohm noted that he used to spend an entire day managing backups but now spends only an hour per week. “I used to spend all day on Monday just dealing with issues stemming from our weekend backup jobs. Now, our backups run flawlessly each and every night,” he said. “Having the ExaGrid system in place really has taken the worry and stress out of our backups. I’ve always been paranoid about backups, so I love the reliability and peace of mind that the ExaGrid system gives me.”

ExaGrid and Veritas Backup Exec

Veritas Backup Exec provides cost-effective, high-performance backup and recovery – including continuous data protection for Microsoft Exchange servers, Microsoft SQL servers, file servers, and workstations. High-performance agents and options provide fast, flexible, granular protection and scalable management of local and remote server backups. Organizations using Veritas Backup Exec can look to ExaGrid Tiered Backup Storage for nightly backups. ExaGrid sits behind existing backup applications, such as Veritas Backup Exec, providing faster and more reliable backups and restores. In a network running Veritas Backup Exec, using ExaGrid is as easy as pointing existing backup jobs at a NAS share on the ExaGrid system. Backup jobs are sent directly from the backup application to ExaGrid for backup to disk.

About ExaGrid

ExaGrid provides Tiered Backup Storage with a unique disk-cache Landing Zone that enables fastest backups and restores, a Repository Tier that offers the lowest cost for long-term retention and enables ransomware recovery, and scale-out architecture which includes full appliances with up to 6PB full backup in a single system.

Talk to us about your needs

ExaGrid is the expert in backup storage—it’s all we do.

Request Pricing

Our team is trained to ensure that your system is properly sized and supported to meet your growing data needs.

Contact us for pricing »

Talk With One of Our System Engineers

With ExaGrid’s Tiered Backup Storage, each appliance in the system brings with it not only disk, but also memory, bandwidth, and processing power—all the elements needed to maintain high backup performance.

Schedule call »

Schedule Proof of Concept (POC)

Test ExaGrid by installing it in your environment to experience improved backup performance, faster restores, ease of use, and scalability. Put it to the test! 8 out of 10 who test it, decide to keep it.

Schedule now »